Biblio

The purpose of this paper is to analyze all Cloud based Service Models, Continuous Integration, Deployment and Delivery process and propose an Automated Continuous Testing and testing as a service based TestBot and metrics dashboard which will be integrated with all existing automation, bug logging, build management, configuration and test management tools. Recently cloud is being used by organizations to save time, money and efforts required to setup and maintain infrastructure and platform. Continuous Integration and Delivery is in practice nowadays within Agile methodology to give capability of multiple software releases on daily basis and ensuring all the development, test and Production environments could be synched up quickly. In such an agile environment there is need to ramp up testing tools and processes so that overall regression testing including functional, performance and security testing could be done along with build deployments at real time. To support this phenomenon, we researched on Continuous Testing and worked with industry professionals who are involved in architecting, developing and testing the software products. A lot of research has been done towards automating software testing so that testing of software product could be done quickly and overall testing process could be optimized. As part of this paper we have proposed ACT TestBot tool, metrics dashboard and coined 4S quality metrics term to quantify quality of the software product. ACT testbot and metrics dashboard will be integrated with Continuous Integration tools, Bug reporting tools, test management tools and Data Analytics tools to trigger automation scripts, continuously analyze application logs, open defects automatically and generate metrics reports. Defect pattern report will be created to support root cause analysis and to take preventive action.

The current evaluation of API recommendation systems mainly focuses on correctness, which is calculated through matching results with ground-truth APIs. However, this measurement may be affected if there exist more than one APIs in a result. In practice, some APIs are used to implement basic functionalities (e.g., print and log generation). These APIs can be invoked everywhere, and they may contribute less than functionally related APIs to the given requirements in recommendation. To study the impacts of correct-but-useless APIs, we use utility to measure them. Our study is conducted on more than 5,000 matched results generated by two specification-based API recommendation techniques. The results show that the matched APIs are heavily overlapped, 10% APIs compose more than 80% matched results. The selected 10% APIs are all correct, but few of them are used to implement the required functionality. We further propose a heuristic approach to measure the utility and conduct an online evaluation with 15 developers. Their reports confirm that the matched results with higher utility score usually have more efforts on programming than the lower ones.

Software components are software units designed to interact with other independently developed software components. These components are assembled by third parties into software applications. The success of final software applications largely depends upon the selection of appropriate and easy to fit components in software application according to the need of customer. It is primary requirement to evaluate the quality of components before using them in the final software application system. All the quality characteristics may not be of same significance for a particular software application of a specific domain. Therefore, it is necessary to identify only those characteristics/ sub-characteristics, which may have higher importance over the others. Analytical Network Process (ANP) is used to solve the decision problem, where attributes of decision parameters form dependency networks. The objective of this paper is to propose ANP based model to prioritize the characteristics /sub-characteristics of quality and to o estimate the numeric value of software quality.
 

In recent years, new types of cyber attacks called targeted attacks have been observed. It targets specific organizations or individuals, while usual large-scale attacks do not focus on specific targets. Organizations have published many Word or PDF files on their websites. These files may provide the starting point for targeted attacks if they include hidden data unintentionally generated in the authoring process. Adhatarao and Lauradoux analyzed hidden data found in the PDF files published by security agencies in many countries and showed that many PDF files potentially leak information like author names, details on the information system and computer architecture. In this study, we analyze hidden data of PDF files published on the website of police agencies in Japan and compare the results with Adhatarao and Lauradoux's. We gathered 110989 PDF files. 56% of gathered PDF files contain personal names, organization names, usernames, or numbers that seem to be IDs within the organizations. 96% of PDF files contain software names.

Trustworthiness is a paramount concern for users and customers in the selection of a software solution, specially in the context of complex and dynamic environments, such as Cloud and IoT. However, assessing and benchmarking trustworthiness (worthiness of software for being trusted) is a challenging task, mainly due to the variety of application scenarios (e.g., businesscritical, safety-critical), the large number of determinative quality attributes (e.g., security, performance), and last, but foremost, due to the subjective notion of trust and trustworthiness. In this paper, we present trustworthiness as a measurable notion in relative terms based on security attributes and propose an approach for the assessment and benchmarking of software. The main goal is to build a trustworthiness assessment model based on software metrics (e.g., Cyclomatic Complexity, CountLine, CBO) that can be used as indicators of software security. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we assessed and ranked several files and functions of the Mozilla Firefox project based on their trustworthiness score and conducted a survey among several software security experts in order to validate the obtained rank. Results show that our approach is able to provide a sound ranking of the benchmarked software.

The article considers the approach to static analysis of program code and the general principles of static analyzer operation. The authors identify the most important syntactic and semantic information in the programs, which can be used to find errors in the source code. The general methodology for development of diagnostic rules is proposed, which will improve the efficiency of static code analyzers.

Software metrics are widely used to measure the quality of software and to give an early indication of the efficiency of the development process in industry. There are many well-established frameworks for measuring the quality of source code through metrics, but limited attention has been paid to the quality of software models. In this article, we evaluate the quality of state machine models specified using the Analytical Software Design (ASD) tooling. We discuss how we applied a number of metrics to ASD models in an industrial setting and report about results and lessons learned while collecting these metrics. Furthermore, we recommend some quality limits for each metric and validate them on models developed in a number of industrial projects.

Blockchain is an emerging technology for decentralized and transactional data sharing across a large network of untrusted participants. It enables new forms of distributed software architectures, where components can find agreements on their shared states without trusting a central integration point or any particular participating components. Considering the blockchain as a software connector helps make explicitly important architectural considerations on the resulting performance and quality attributes (for example, security, privacy, scalability and sustainability) of the system. Based on our experience in several projects using blockchain, in this paper we provide rationales to support the architectural decision on whether to employ a decentralized blockchain as opposed to other software solutions, like traditional shared data storage. Additionally, we explore specific implications of using the blockchain as a software connector including design trade-offs regarding quality attributes.

Secure by design is an approach to developing secure software systems from the ground up. In such approach, the alternate security tactics are first thought, among them, the best are selected and enforced by the architecture design, and then used as guiding principles for developers. Thus, design flaws in the architecture of a software system mean that successful attacks could result in enormous consequences. Therefore, secure by design shifts the main focus of software assurance from finding security bugs to identifying architectural flaws in the design. Current research in software security has been neglecting vulnerabilities which are caused by flaws in a software architecture design and/or deteriorations of the implementation of the architectural decisions. In this paper, we present the concept of Common Architectural Weakness Enumeration (CAWE), a catalog which enumerates common types of vulnerabilities rooted in the architecture of a software and provides mitigation techniques to address them. The CAWE catalog organizes the architectural flaws according to known security tactics. We developed an interactive web-based solution which helps designers and developers explore this catalog based on architectural choices made in their project. CAWE catalog contains 224 weaknesses related to security architecture. Through this catalog, we aim to promote the awareness of security architectural flaws and stimulate the security design thinking of developers, software engineers, and architects.

Code coverage is a widely used measure to determine how thoroughly an application is tested. There are many tools available for different languages. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of them focus on unit testing and ignore end-to-end tests with ui- or web tests. Furthermore, there is no support for determining code coverage of transcompiled cross-platform applications. This kind of application is written in one language, but compiled to and executed in a different programming language. Besides, it may run on a different platform. In this paper, we propose a new code coverage testing method that calculates the code coverage of any kind of test (unit-, integration- or ui-/web-test) for any type of (transcompiled) applications (desktop, web or mobile application). Developers obtain information about which parts of the source code are uncovered by tests. The basis of our approach is generic and may be applied in numerous programming languages based on an abstract syntax tree. We present our approach for any-kind-applications developed in Java and evaluate our tool on a web application created with Google Web Toolkit, on standard desktop applications, and on some small Java applications that use the Swing library to create user interfaces. Our results show that our tool is able to judge the code coverage of any kind of test. In particular, our tool is independent of the unit- or ui-/web test-framework in use. The runtime performance is promising although it is not as fast as already existing tools in the area of unit-testing.

Java programming language is considered highly important due to its extensive use in the development of web, desktop as well as handheld devices applications. Implementing Java Coding standards on Java code has great importance as it creates consistency and as a result better development and maintenance. Finding bugs and standard's violations is important at an early stage of software development than at a later stage when the change becomes impossible or too expensive. In the paper, some tools and research work done on Coding Standard Analyzers is reviewed. These tools are categorized based on the type of rules they cheeked, namely: style, concurrency, exceptions, and quality, security, dependency and general methods of static code analysis. Finally, list of Java Coding Standards Enforcing Tools are analyzed against certain predefined parameters that are limited by the scope of research paper under study. This review will provide the basis for selecting a static code analysis tool that enforce International Java Coding Standards such as the Rule of Ten and the JPL Coding Standards. Such tools have great importance especially in the development of mission/safety critical system. This work can be very useful for developers in selecting a good tool for Java code analysis, according to their requirements.

Context: Software security is an imperative aspect of software quality. Early detection of vulnerable code during development can better ensure the security of the codebase and minimize testing efforts. Although traditional software metrics are used for early detection of vulnerabilities, they do not clearly address the granularity level of the issue to precisely pinpoint vulnerabilities. The goal of this study is to employ method-level traceable patterns (nano-patterns) in vulnerability prediction and empirically compare their performance with traditional software metrics. The concept of nano-patterns is similar to design patterns, but these constructs can be automatically recognized and extracted from source code. If nano-patterns can better predict vulnerable methods compared to software metrics, they can be used in developing vulnerability prediction models with better accuracy. Aims: This study explores the performance of method-level patterns in vulnerability prediction. We also compare them with method-level software metrics. Method: We studied vulnerabilities reported for two major releases of Apache Tomcat (6 and 7), Apache CXF, and two stand-alone Java web applications. We used three machine learning techniques to predict vulnerabilities using nano-patterns as features. We applied the same techniques using method-level software metrics as features and compared their performance with nano-patterns. Results: We found that nano-patterns show lower false negative rates for classifying vulnerable methods (for Tomcat 6, 21% vs 34.7%) and therefore, have higher recall in predicting vulnerable code than the software metrics used. On the other hand, software metrics show higher precision than nano-patterns (79.4% vs 76.6%). Conclusion: In summary, we suggest developers use nano-patterns as features for vulnerability prediction to augment existing approaches as these code constructs outperform standard metrics in terms of prediction recall.

Concurrency vulnerabilities caused by synchronization problems will occur in the execution of multi-threaded programs, and the emergence of concurrency vulnerabilities often cause great threats to the system. Once the concurrency vulnerabilities are exploited, the system will suffer various attacks, seriously affecting its availability, confidentiality and security. In this paper, we extract 839 concurrency vulnerabilities from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), and conduct a comprehensive analysis of the trend, classifications, causes, severity, and impact. Finally, we obtained some findings: 1) From 1999 to 2021, the number of concurrency vulnerabilities disclosures show an overall upward trend. 2) In the distribution of concurrency vulnerability, race condition accounts for the largest proportion. 3) The overall severity of concurrency vulnerabilities is medium risk. 4) The number of concurrency vulnerabilities that can be exploited for local access and network access is almost equal, and nearly half of the concurrency vulnerabilities (377/839) can be accessed remotely. 5) The access complexity of 571 concurrency vulnerabilities is medium, and the number of concurrency vulnerabilities with high or low access complexity is almost equal. The results obtained through the empirical study can provide more support and guidance for research in the field of concurrency vulnerabilities.

Agile methods frequently have difficulties with qualities, often specifying quality requirements as stories, e.g., "As a user, I need a safe and secure system." Such projects will generally schedule some capability releases followed by safety and security releases, only to discover user-developer misunderstandings and unsecurable agile code, leading to project failure. Very large agile projects also have further difficulties with project velocity and scalability. Examples are trying to use daily standup meetings, 2-week sprints, shared tacit knowledge vs. documents, and dealing with user-developer misunderstandings. At USC, our Parallel Agile, Executable Architecture research project shows some success at mid-scale (50 developers). We also examined several large (hundreds of developers) TRW projects that had succeeded with rapid, high-quality development. The paper elaborates on their common Critical Quality Factors: a concurrent 3-team approach, an empowered Keeper of the Project Vision, and a management approach emphasizing qualities.

Defect prediction is an active topic in software quality assurance, which can help developers find potential bugs and make better use of resources. To improve prediction performance, this paper introduces cross-entropy, one common measure for natural language, as a new code metric into defect prediction tasks and proposes a framework called DefectLearner for this process. We first build a recurrent neural network language model to learn regularities in source code from software repository. Based on the trained model, the cross-entropy of each component can be calculated. To evaluate the discrimination for defect-proneness, cross-entropy is compared with 20 widely used metrics on 12 open-source projects. The experimental results show that cross-entropy metric is more discriminative than 50% of the traditional metrics. Besides, we combine cross-entropy with traditional metric suites together for accurate defect prediction. With cross-entropy added, the performance of prediction models is improved by an average of 2.8% in F1-score.

Several defect prediction models proposed are effective when historical datasets are available. Defect prediction becomes difficult when no historical data exist. Cross-project defect prediction (CPDP), which uses projects from other sources/companies to predict the defects in the target projects proposed in recent studies has shown promising results. However, the performance of most CPDP approaches are still beyond satisfactory mainly due to distribution mismatch between the source and target projects. In this study, a credibility theory based Naïve Bayes (CNB) classifier is proposed to establish a novel reweighting mechanism between the source projects and target projects so that the source data could simultaneously adapt to the target data distribution and retain its own pattern. Our experimental results show that the feasibility of the novel algorithm design and demonstrate the significant improvement in terms of the performance metrics considered achieved by CNB over other CPDP approaches.

Code churn has been successfully used to identify defect inducing changes in software development. Our recent analysis of the cross-release code churn showed that several design metrics exhibit moderate correlation with the number of defects in complex systems. The goal of this paper is to explore whether cross-release code churn can be used to identify critical design change and contribute to prediction of defects for software in evolution. In our case study, we used two types of data from consecutive releases of open-source projects, with and without cross-release code churn, to build standard prediction models. The prediction models were trained on earlier releases and tested on the following ones, evaluating the performance in terms of AUC, GM and effort aware measure Pop. The comparison of their performance was used to answer our research question. The obtained results showed that the prediction model performs better when cross-release code churn is included. Practical implication of this research is to use cross-release code churn to aid in safe planning of next release in software development.

STAMP (System Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) is one of the theories that has been attracting attention as a new safety analysis method for complex systems. CAST (Causal Analysis using System Theory) is a causal analysis method based on STAMP theory. The authors investigated an information security incident case, “AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) report on unauthorized access to information systems,” and attempted accident analysis using CAST. We investigated whether CAST could be applied to the cyber security analysis. Since CAST is a safety accident analysis technique, this study was the first to apply CAST to cyber security incidents. Its effectiveness was confirmed from the viewpoint of the following three research questions. Q1:Features of CAST as an accident analysis method Q2:Applicability and impact on security accident analysis Q3:Understanding cyber security incidents with a five-layer model.

Video summarization aims to improve the efficiency of large-scale video browsing through producting concise summaries. It has been popular among many scenarios such as video surveillance, video review and data annotation. Traditional video summarization techniques focus on filtration in image features dimension or image semantics dimension. However, such techniques can make a large amount of possible useful information lost, especially for many videos with rich text semantics like interviews, teaching videos, in that only the information relevant to the image dimension will be retained. In order to solve the above problem, this paper considers video summarization as a continuous multi-dimensional decision-making process. Specifically, the summarization model predicts a probability for each frame and its corresponding text, and then we designs reward methods for each of them. Finally, comprehensive summaries in two dimensions, i.e. images and semantics, is generated. This approach is not only unsupervised and does not rely on labels and user interaction, but also decouples the semantic and image summarization models to provide more usable interfaces for subsequent engineering use.

Attack surface detection for the complex software is needed to find targets for the fuzzing, because testing the whole system with many inputs is not realistic. Researchers that previously applied taint analysis for dealing with different security tasks in the virtual machines did not examined how to apply it for attack surface detection. I.e., getting the program modules and functions, that may be affected by input data. We propose using taint tracking within a virtual machine and virtual machine introspection to create a new approach that can detect the internal module interfaces that can be fuzz tested to assure that software is safe or find the vulnerabilities.

The article considers the approach to identifying potentially unsafe data in program code of embedded systems which can lead to errors and fails in the functioning of equipment. The sources of invalid data are revealed and the process of changing the status of this data in process of static code analysis is shown. The mechanism for annotating functions that operate on unsafe data is described, which allows to control the entire process of using them and thus it will improve the quality of the output code.

How to evaluate software reliability based on historical data of embedded software projects is one of the problems we have to face in practical engineering. Therefore, we establish a software reliability evaluation model based on code metrics. This evaluation technique requires the aggregation of software code metrics into project metrics. Statistical value methods, metric distribution methods, and econometric methods are commonly-used aggregation methods. What are the differences between these methods in the software reliability evaluation process, and which methods can improve the accuracy of the reliability assessment model we have established are our concerns. In view of these concerns, we conduct an empirical study on the application of software code metric aggregation methods based on actual projects. We find the distribution of code metrics for the projects under study. Using these distribution laws, we optimize the aggregation method of code metrics and improve the accuracy of the software reliability evaluation model.

In recent years, the complexity of software vulnera-bilities has continued to increase. Manual vulnerability detection methods alone no longer meet the demand. With the rapid development of the deep learning, many neural network models have been widely applied to source code vulnerability detection. The variant of recurrent neural network (RNN), bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), has been a popular choice in vulnerability detection. However, is BiLSTM the most suitable choice? To answer this question, we conducted a series of experiments to investigate the effectiveness of different neural network models for source code vulnerability detection. The results shows that the variants of RNN, gated recurrent unit (GRU) and bidirectional GRU, are more capable of detecting source code fragments with mixed vulnerability types. And the concatenated convolutional neural network is more capable of detecting source code fragments of single vulnerability types.

Software security is an important aspect of ensuring software quality. Early detection of vulnerable code during development is essential for the developers to make cost and time effective software testing. The traditional software metrics are used for early detection of software vulnerability, but they are not directly related to code constructs and do not specify any particular granularity level. The goal of this study is to help developers evaluate software security using class-level traceable patterns called micro patterns to reduce security risks. The concept of micro patterns is similar to design patterns, but they can be automatically recognized and mined from source code. If micro patterns can better predict vulnerable classes compared to traditional software metrics, they can be used in developing a vulnerability prediction model. This study explores the performance of class-level patterns in vulnerability prediction and compares them with traditional class-level software metrics. We studied security vulnerabilities as reported for one major release of Apache Tomcat, Apache Camel and three stand-alone Java web applications. We used machine learning techniques for predicting vulnerabilities using micro patterns and class-level metrics as features. We found that micro patterns have higher recall in detecting vulnerable classes than the software metrics.

Security is often a critical problem in software systems. The consequences of the failure lead to substantial economic loss or extensive environmental damage. Developing secure software is challenging, and retrofitting existing systems to introduce security is even harder. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for Finding and Repairing Bugs based on security patterns (FireBugs), to repair defects causing security vulnerabilities. To locate and fix security bugs, we apply security patterns that are reusable solutions comprising large amounts of software design experience in many different situations. In the evaluation, we investigated 2,800 Android app repositories to apply our approach to 200 subject projects that use javax.crypto APIs. The vision of our automated approach is to reduce software maintenance burdens where the number of outstanding software defects exceeds available resources. Our ultimate vision is to design more security patterns that have a positive impact on software quality by disseminating correlated sets of best security design practices and knowledge.